I have really tried to like this game. I really have. I've played for approximately 20 hours and I just can't stand it anymore. I bought it because I read somewhere it's the best VR tennis game there is. I sincerely do hope that isn't the case.
Tl:dr: Don't buy it if you're looking for VR tennis. This game is so far removed from tennis due to its mechanics and its quirks and errors that you have to relearn everything you know to come anywhere close to being competent and I simply don't want to do that.
There are several key things wrong with the mechanics of the game, the most grueling two being the force calculation and the trajectory calculation after impact with the racket. When you hit the ball with the racket, the ball gets projected in the direction you hit it in [b] the millisecond it made contact with the racket, [/b], meaning anything else that happens after does not affect its trajectory. This is fine for shots where the ball hits the racket and rebounds quickly, but it's a garbage way to calculate smashes, for example. When you're at the net and you try to hit a smash, everything depends on how the racket hits the ball initially. It doesn't matter if you follow through by continuing to move the racket downward, the ball doesn't care. This means you can't hit a proper smash, because the ball will just limp forward in the direction your racket was pointed the instant you hit it and the smash becomes a drop shot and it ruins the rally.
This is all for Arcade, by the way. It gets amplified in Simulation, where if you don't angle the racket just right, the ball will either fly way out or hit the net. Remember before when I said this calculation method mostly worked for forehands and backhands? Well, in Simulation, that is no longer the case. Because the game isn't forcing the ball to go in the right direction anymore, a simple backhand turns into a nightmare.
The force calculation is also done incorrectly. When you hit a ball, the game tries (tries) to calculate how fast the ball should rebound. I don't know how it does this for sure, but I do know that it leads to you ending up flicking your wrist more than properly swinging your arm, because the latter is useless. If a ball is approaching and you swing your arm as you normally would for a tennis game, (besides causing your headset to not be able to track your controller momentarily, glitching the game out, though this isn't a problem with the more expensive headsets with tracking towers which most people don't have) you hit the ball slower than you would if you just place the racket in front of the ball and flick your wrist forward. This, combined with the bad direction calculation, only exacerbates these problems.
Another huge problem the game has is the movement in general. As I've said, there are several ways you can move around the court, the main ones being the joystick and the auto run. Both are broken.
When you try to run with your joystick, for some reason, you barely move at all sometimes, rendering it useless, at least for me. There probably is some way for it to work or some specific thing I have to do with my hand to force it to work, but if you can't tell from this review, I am done learning this game's every error and its fix to just be able to play. I am therefore forced to use Auto run, which is probably the single most broken thing in the game. I've been thinking about writing a review on this game but I kept giving it chance after chance after chance, and I just played a match where the AI screwed me so many times I just decided it was time.
First off, the AI decides whether you're hitting a forehand or a backhand by either standing to the left or to the right of the ball, and generally, it does a good job of predicting what you want to do. But not that rarely, when you're running after the ball, as you approach it, it randomly decides to switch at the very last second, when you're already positioned to hit a forehand, for example, and the ball has already passed you before you can do anything. This has happened enough times to warrant a mention here. Sometimes, the AI also just decides to move forwards for absolutely no reason. The ball is coming in diagonally and you could hit it if you just move left a little, but the AI decides that it would be a better course of action to run up to the net for no reason, making hitting the ball literally impossible.
Yet another problem, which happens every single time someone hits a lob, is that the AI works in a way where it decides to go somewhere once the opponent has hit the ball, goes there and just stays there until you hit the ball again, which means that sometimes, when the opponent hits a lob or a drop shot and forces you to run up to the net, the AI calculates where it should place you, runs up and stops dead in its tracks, making hitting the shot impossible. I've hit the ceiling with my controller several times just from trying to jump high enough to hit a shot I could have hit by just moving backwards. Another case where this is a problem is when the ball bounces next to you. Instead of moving back, it just stays right where it is, forcing you to hit very low (and therefore very weak) shots to continue the rally. And when it isn't doing that, when you run up to hit a shot, instead of taking on more of an intermediate position, it runs all the way back to the center mark, and since when you return a far left shot in this game it almost always is another far left shot, you can't do anything and have to watch as the ball flies past you while the AI panics.
The final problem I have with the movement is that the game thinks you are in an actual tennis court, because it expects you to launch yourself horizontally Monfils-style sometimes. It just stops and expects YOU to move the remaining distance to hit the shot comfortably, which just doesn't work, and I have a fairly large play area. These five problems I have just listed have happened in about 50% of the rallies in a single 3 set match. Unplayable.
On top of all this, it's a buggy mess. It crashes about 10% of the times you try to boot it up, it occasionally locks up when you try to enter a game mode, select a language or enter a match forcing you to close it (and sometimes it locks up again after doing that), your racket disappears sometimes and you have to delete your entire character to fix it, your opponents may become invisible, the ball sometimes just flies out in a random direction when you hit it in the most slightly unorthodox way, the force calculation sometimes bugs out and doesn't give the ball enough force to even make it past the net (even after hitting it with the same exact way as a previous, successful shot), the ball sometimes disappears, softlocking the game and forcing you to restart the entire match and more things I can't remember right now.
You may say, "buT YOu'rE oNLy SaYiNg tHiS BEcAusE yOu'RE bAd! HoW is iT thaT THEre aRe goOd PLayeRs iF thE gaMe doEsn'T woRk?". They're good because they learned every single quirk and mastered every single technique associated with playing [b] this game. [/b] I want to play [b] tennis, [/b] and as I have explained in this review, this game isn't tennis. It's based on tennis, but the way the mechanics work forces you to completely relearn everything you know about playing real tennis, and this comes from someone who has played tennis for over 12 years.
I have tried to look past everything I have mentioned in this review, but today I reached my breaking point. If you are willing to spend hundreds of hours mastering this game's every quirk and mechanic, yes, you can get better and enjoy yourself. But I don't. I want to play [b] tennis. [/b] And this game is not tennis. Do not buy this game if you're looking for that experience. I am one match like the one I played today away from refunding the game and uninstalling it, especially since the game is already overpriced for what it is.
